Spark Arena hosted the final show of Jason Derulo’s Australasian run on Sunday 27 September, and the pop and R&B veteran sent it off with pyrotechnics, a genre-hopping stage built out of five worlds, and two crazy local moments that outlasted the night.
Support came from Australian DJ and producer Josh Fawaz, whose remix set stitched together Gotye and Kimbra, Usher, Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas, the Pussycat Dolls, David Guetta and more into a set that had the crowd singing along before the headliner had even appeared. Derulo himself made the audience wait for him properly, a 20-minute montage of tour footage (closing, on ABBA’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme”) ran before a countdown finally brought him out to “Sexy For Me.”
From there the show unfolded in themed chapters rather than a straight setlist. It opened in “Derulo Labs,” dancers in lab coats and sequinned bodysuits, two performers suspended in cages up the tiered stage, before “Wiggle” got the floor moving. “Acapulco” pulled the opposite move, Derulo dropping the sunglasses and singing a stripped-back verse with no backing at all, a reminder that the voice under all the production doesn’t need the spectacle to hold a room this size.
The night’s two biggest local moments both landed inside the same stretch of the set. During “Mi Chico,” Derulo asked if the song’s viral TikTok dance had made it to New Zealand and pulled an audience member on stage to prove it. Mele Taeiloa, a dance teacher from Manurewa, was in the crowd on what she later described as a spur-of-the-moment call from a friend already dancing on stage. She nailed the choreography in front of a sold-out arena, and by the next morning the clip had passed a million views online, enough to have her fielding interview requests before she’d even made it to her day job.
The other was “Savage Love,” built on the “Laxed (Siren Beat)” instrumental that Manurewa producer Jawsh 685 (Joshua Nanai) made “one day after school” in 2019 before it went viral worldwide the following year off the back of his collaboration with Derulo. Derulo brought him out to perform it live, telling the crowd he’d created something that had “transcended language” and calling out the Samoan culture behind the sound, a genuine full-circle moment for a song that started as a bedroom beat on the other side of the same city hosting the show.
Between those two peaks, the stage kept transforming: “Marry Me” saw Derulo drop to one knee for a mock proposal to the entire arena, “Derulo Jungle” brought leopard print and a fur coat, a bar-themed stretch (complete with a Nina Simone interlude) carried “Spicy Margarita” and “Jalebi Baby,” and “The Other Side” had him walking directly into the general admission crowd while “Seven Nation Army” played underneath. The final act, “Derulo Volcano,” went all in on fire dancers and pyrotechnics through “Cheyenne,” “Trumpets” and into the “Talk Dirty” and “Want to Want Me” closing run, no traditional encore, but a top came off instead, which the room seemed to accept as a fair trade.
It was a show built for its own finale energy, a tour-closing setlist with two local moments woven through the middle of it rather than tacked on, and Auckland’s crowd made the most of both.
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